Excessive Force

From the picture window in the front room, Joseph Montelon could see them approaching across the lawn.

He had been on the couch, soaking up a quiet moment on the tag end of an August afternoon. His wife was out on errands, his four-year-old daughter napping in back. Outside, the retreating sun tossed long shadows across the uniform spread of his Wickliffe neighborhood, a street of shoulder-to-shoulder one-story homes and middle-class families. Here, Montelon easily blended in with his surroundings: another average Joe with bills to pay and a patch of lawn to mow.

But life in Lake County was a second act for Montelon, a place where his name didn’t carry the weight it did 50 miles down the coast in his hometown of Lorain. On that hushed summer evening in 2008, Montelon’s past and present were due for a collision.

The men came in single file: six police officers fanning across Montelon’s field of vision, heading for the side door. They wore bulletproof vests, and one shouldered a battering ram.

Montelon hauled over to the door and got it open before they had a chance to knock. Face to face with a stony wall of cops, he was told they were there to serve a search warrant. It’s about the letters, they said.

“No, you guys are here for the boxes of information,” he replied.

Montelon’s hands were cuffed behind his back as the group started pulling the house apart. The posse was a mixed bag of law enforcement: members of the Wickliffe Police and his old employer, the Lorain PD. There was also a captain from the Lorain Sheriff’s Office named Richard Resendez, whom Montelon knew when both were cops.

“Why did you attack me in those letters?” Resendez demanded. When Montelon didn’t answer, he went on: “You’re going to have a nice life once we’re through with you.”

Lorain is the wild western edge of Northeast Ohio, a historically tough area that’s only growing tougher, thanks to years of job drought, a shriveling tax base, and crime.

Nestled on Lake Erie, the low-slung cityscape of old storefronts is dwarfed by the spidering black architecture of nearby steel mills, the longtime municipal heartbeat. Today, its working-class neighborhoods are a crazy quilt of gang turf; gunshots are common on the weed-cracked streets. Residents say they come home from work, bolt the door, and don’t dare peep out until sunup. Council members have been known to make their door-to-door rounds with Kevlar vests and handguns.

Refereeing the free-for-all is Ohio’s fifth-largest police department. If allegations of misconduct are common among any metropolitan force, Lorain’s cops make the news almost as much as the thugs they chase — for everything from tazering cuffed suspects and complaints of excessive force to holing up in their homes and prompting SWAT standoffs. A growing chorus of critics says the top man, Chief Cel Rivera, has let the department run wild. Today, the U.S. Department of Justice is running a probe of the Lorain Police — an investigation for which Joe Montelon may be partly responsible.

Years ago, Montelon was one of those officers making dubious headlines. For him, being a Lorain cop wasn’t a career decision as much as an inheritance. His father was on the force, and Joe spent his childhood visiting the station and sitting on cops’ knees in wide-eyed awe of the life.

Following a stint in the U.S. Air Force, he signed on in 1992. But after a 16-week training program, the young cop was accused of having sex with underage girls when he was a teenager. According to a later article in The Chronicle-Telegram, one of the victims tried to back out on her allegations, claiming “she had only told police what they wanted to hear,” but that he did “molest her in the 1980s.” Cel Rivera was one of the investigating officers.

Montelon pleaded to attempted rape and gross sexual imposition, was booted from the force, and served a brief jail sentence — busted down from cop to con in a matter of weeks.

Forever turned away from sporting police blues, Montelon had to reboot. He left Lorain, enrolled at Cleveland State, and eventually earned a master’s from Case Western Reserve. He put down roots in Lake County.

Today, he is an inconspicuous addition to the suburban landscape: a doughy, ample-gutted computer tech with hair the color and shine of pencil lead and eyes that always seem pinched in a playful squint, as if he were facing down strong wind and enjoying every second of it. Ostensibly, he’s moved on.

But for a guy who’d grown up amid visions of the badge, the wounds didn’t heal. When the chance arose, Montelon wouldn’t hesitate to strike back at the department. And as he’s learned since, Lorain Police have a history of wielding the blunt edge of the law against critics.

On paper, Jesse Sanchez never was a top cop. By the time his run at the Lorain PD ended, he’d logged nearly 30 years — one of the longest tenures in department history. But Sanchez’s personnel file was Britannica-thick, stuffed with missteps, reprimands, and suspensions. And when it was time to go, he went out the one way no cop wants to: with a prison sentence.

Sanchez’s days as a cop are long gone, but he says he’s still trying to do right. Sliding into a booth at a cookie-cut chain restaurant in Westlake, he’s a wide-shouldered guy with a coffee-and-cream complexion, large-framed specs, and thin mustache. His fingers — decked out in rows of thick gold rings — clutch a briefcase. Inside, Sanchez hoards documents: police reports, unanswered letters, and photocopied articles — the paper trail that reveals how a career patrolman became a serious pain in the ass for the Lorain Police.

“What I wanted was equal rights in the rules and regulations in the department,” Sanchez says, his voice a pitch or two above a mumble. “I never got that.”

Sanchez was always a department outsider, never one to pal around with his fellow officers. In part, it was because he recognized a troubling pattern of double standards when it came to officer misconduct: certain cops walked when they got in trouble; others didn’t.

Sanchez also earned a reputation for pushing back against the bosses. In the ’80s, he tried and failed to swap the department’s union — the Fraternal Order of Police — with the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. In 1996, he wrecked a cruiser after running a red light on a 911 call. The brass suspended him, though other officers had racked-up similar infractions and walked. Sanchez beat the ticket, took the department to arbitration, and won back his three days.

“People said I’d won a victory with that, but I knew it just marked me for down the line,” he says.

The real trouble started in 2002. Over the previous year, Sanchez had been involved with Sarah Long, a divorced woman he met on a call. By the end of the year, the relationship went south, but not before he loaned Long $600. When she didn’t make good on it, Sanchez began calling and stopping by her house. Eventually, Long filed a complaint, claiming Sanchez had been harassing her since 2001.

According to police documents, the LPD investigated, and Sanchez was reprimanded in November 2002. A month later, his National Guard unit was activated; he would spend the next two years patrolling the grounds of the 180th Fighter Wing in Toledo. But while he was away, the reverberations from his incident with Long kept sounding. In October 2003, a year after the incident, Long filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Sanchez and the city.

Sanchez didn’t buy the allegations, in part because he knew the department’s history. Sexual misconduct was an unofficial status quo at the LPD. The tales he’d heard over the years were like adolescent fantasies straight out of the Penthouse Letters: cops having sex on duty, flashing women, receiving oral sex in their cruisers, urinating on their wives. Usually, nothing was ever done about it. Compared to the stories regularly circulating the station house, the Long situation was small change.

But when Sanchez returned in 2005, Long’s suit went into overdrive, getting refiled in federal court. Sanchez was deposed five times. The city said it would not defend him, though it routinely had defended officers in the past. The decision “wasn’t fair and was not common,” according to Kevin Powers, an attorney with the Ohio Policemen’s Benevolent Association who eventually represented Sanchez.

“The problem was, Ms. Long — through advice of her attorney — so overinflated her claims that they sounded criminal in nature, so the city said they weren’t going to defend him,” Powers says. “I think Jesse got a raw deal. She wasn’t harmed by him. I’m not sure of the full extent of their relationship, but it was clearly consensual. She exploited the situation to her own advantage.”

To Sanchez, having his department turn its back on him was just another example of the double standard he’d seen for years. Lorain Police would defend those it wanted to, but leave others out to dry. Left to his own defense, Sanchez decided to breach the blue wall.

In January 2006, he sat down with Powers and wrote a two-page list of dirty laundry documenting almost a dozen instances of sexual misconduct — everything from domestic violence to station house high jinks with superimposed pornographic pictures. Each officer involved was listed. For Sanchez, the document was a bargaining chip. It would prove to be the most controversial two-pager ever to float through the city.

“He was clearly not going to be a popular guy,” Powers says. “He was opening the closet door to expose everyone’s skeletons.”

In August 2006, Sanchez was called into a police interrogation room. Waiting inside were police Captain Russ Cambarare and Richard Resendez, a former cop who had since become a captain with the Lorain County Sheriff. Sanchez knew what was coming, but he asked anyway.

“What is the specific purpose of this, this investigation?”

“Administrative investigation,” Cambarare replied. “This isn’t a criminal investigation.”

“This investigation is based on this affidavit, the affidavit you filed in — for your pending action in federal court, correct?” Resendez added a moment later.

The affidavit in question was actually a watered-down version of the document cut at the beginning of the year. Sanchez’s attorney had arranged for the officer to be dropped from the planned federal suit in exchange for his information on the rampant police sexual misconduct. Long’s lawyers claimed the department had failed to rein in its officers, and Sanchez’s info was their ammo.

A new affidavit surfaced in July — this time without the names of the officers involved. But the department had gotten hold of the document, and word was out: Sanchez had named names.

Resendez explained that he’d been asked to assess the allegations, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by Scene. Sanchez signed a document acknowledging the internal interview and was allowed to get a union rep in the room. But he also asked for his own attorney — twice.

“Even if you had an attorney here, Jesse, this is an administrative investigation, not a criminal investigation, so your attorney cannot partake in this interview,” Resendez told him. “This interview’s between me and you.” Failure to answer the questions, he added, could result in disciplinary action.

The interrogation proceeded. Resendez picked apart Sanchez’s allegations, questioning whether the officer had firsthand knowledge of the incidents.

“I gotta tell you, a lot of this stuff is hearsay in this affidavit, and I don’t know how you wouldn’t agree with me on that,” Resendez said near the end of the interview. “You don’t have personal knowledge, you weren’t there.”

Sanchez countered — and maintains today — that he had either heard about each incident directly from those involved or they were widely known among the rank and file. Just because the incidents can’t be proven doesn’t mean they didn’t take place.

The August interrogation was the latest in a series of incidents that flayed Sanchez’s nerves. Every day, he worked alongside guys who knew he had horse-traded their fuck-ups for his own gain. He started staying home, using up sick days. Pressure was also rolling down from up top: In spring, he was suspended for insubordination after asking a question at roll call. Afterward, he was hospitalized for stress.

With his list of enemies ballooning, Sanchez reached out to a former cop he once knew around the station house who ended up on the department’s bad side: Joe Montelon. The two began talking, and Sanchez unloaded about his growing fear of retaliation.

At the time, the police weren’t the only ones putting Sanchez’s accusations under the microscope. Lawyers had released the documents to the media, and Plain Dealer reporters Mark Puente and John Caniglia were excavating the department’s public records for fine print that would back up the claims. Like Resendez, they found much of the rumor mill to be insupportable by concrete fact. What they did find was a grab bag of other misconduct committed by officers and department employees. In journalism terms, it was 90-proof paydirt.

Only days after Sanchez’s sit-down with Resendez, The Plain Dealer launched a series on the claims of harassment and police misconduct. The picture that emerged was not of a police department, but a frat house with guns: dispatchers sleeping through 911 calls; cops leaving their weapons around for drunken friends to find and fire; officers intimidating their ex-wives’ new boyfriends.

Grimmer accounts also surfaced: Officers with complaints of excessive force were still on the force; one patrolman admitted to having sex on duty; a dispatcher who drunkenly beat her daughter evaded criminal charges. In all, one-third of all department employees had been disciplined or sued over allegations of inappropriate conduct since 2000.

The blast radius wouldn’t miss the guy who had kicked up the storm in the first place. In February 2007, Sanchez learned he was the subject of an investigation, but not for anything related to his controversial affidavit. Lorain Police were trying to peg him for the 2002 incident with Sarah Long — the same incident he’d already been reprimanded for five years earlier. This time it was a criminal probe.

“I had more than a positive feeling that they were going to come after me in that way,” he says today. Sanchez was indicted for stalking in March 2007. Two years later, after a three-day trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to 60 days in county lock-up.

The letters started showing up in mailboxes across town over the summer of 2007. The first went to the Lorain County newspapers, city hall officials, and the FBI. It was a short paragraph alleging that Chief Rivera had abused his power by failing to pursue a criminal investigation linked to a member of his family. The case involved a 90-year-old woman who was being extorted by her caretakers, the letter claimed.

An initial investigation was done in 2002, and detectives sent information to the county prosecutor’s office. “Rivera requested its return for further scrutiny and allowed it remain [sic] inactive until 2007.”

The anonymous note was typed on police letterhead; the writer was either in-house or had access to someone on the force.

The accusations proved to be true: A woman in Rivera’s extended family was the main suspect, according to a report by The Plain Dealer. Lorain investigators had passed off the findings to prosecutors before Rivera recalled the case. He told the paper he wanted to make sure the investigation was thorough.

The case then sat, the chief claimed, because officers were “busy dealing with violent crime.” But the newspaper caught another department official attributing the delay to a computer virus. No action was taken for five years, and the elderly woman was bled for $500,000. Rivera denied any wrongdoing and asked the FBI to investigate.

“We looked at the allegations, and we didn’t feel they were substantiated in any way,” FBI Special Agent Scott Wilson tells Scene today.

Meanwhile, anonymous letters kept coming like unofficial newsletters of department dirt — some 20 of them in just over a year. They were written in a mocking tone, like the constant patter of an annoying little brother — a mix of bedroom gossip and misconduct charges: Who was sleeping with who’s wife; who watched while another cop beat a cuffed suspect. Rivera was blasted throughout, along with high-ranking officers including Resendez and Lorain Prosecutor Dennis Will; some letters likened the chief and other higher-ups to the decadent Roman Emperor Caligula and his court.

Although rooted in unsubstantiated claims, the letters dumped gas on an already cooking fire. The groundswell that had started with Sanchez’s affidavit and ballooned with the PD headlines now reached tidal proportions. In April 2008, Lorain City Council held an executive session with the chief to address the rampant reports of cops gone wild.

“There is some kind of new claim against the department every week,” Councilman Dan Given told The Plain Dealer at the time. “The public is not behind them.”

A group of community activists and council members began assembling a cache of material: thousands of pages, from citizen letters and petitions to media reports and leaked documents from inside the station.

In June 2008, the package was mailed to the U.S. Department of Justice along with a formal complaint filed by council members Ann Molnar and Mitch Fallis.

“As a councilwoman, I have to protect the city, and if we have a corrupt police department, we’ll have a corrupt town,” Molnar explained in The Chronicle-Telegram that summer.

Fifty miles up the coast, Joe Montelon was not sitting on the sidelines.

Jesse Sanchez wasn’t the only officer Montelon bent an ear to; he was in regular contact with guys who spoon-fed him the day-to-day.

“I grew up around the department, so I still talked to people over the years, and they were always bitching about the department and the problems,” he says.

Montelon became a sympathetic sounding board: The cops unloaded about rampant misconduct, detailed what officers were getting away with, and shared their feelings of helplessness. If anyone spoke publicly, they could count on some blemish from their own record resurfacing, gift-wrapped in criminal charges. Just look at Sanchez, they said.

Montelon realized the good cops were paralyzed behind the department’s blue wall. If change was going to come, it would have to come from outside. For a guy whose own crime-fighting dreams had been squelched, this was an opportunity too good to pass up.

“I wanted to make a difference for the officers in the department and the citizens in Lorain,” he says, denying that he still nursed a grudge over his conviction. “Once I got into it, I couldn’t stop until we made a difference.”

By the mid-2000s, Montelon started ringing up reporters anonymously to dish about the Lorain PD. He contacted Molnar and other vocal council members. Friends on the force handed off documents and police reports tied to misconduct — information Montelon added to the growing stash eventually sent to the DOJ. (Molnar declined to be interviewed for this story; councilmen Given and Fallis did not return Scene‘s calls seeking comment.)

By the summer of 2008, Montelon had copied every document from the DOJ complaint and warehoused it at his Wickliffe home. Besides the stockpile sent to the Feds, his was the only known copy.

In August, another large stash arrived. When Plain Dealer reporter Mark Puente’s beat was switched at the end of 2007, he handed over the public records he’d copied to council member Ann Molnar. The documents made the rounds among those interested in exposing the police. Jesse Sanchez dropped the box off in Wickliffe, and Montelon immediately shot off copies to the DOJ. As he worked, his house was already being watched.

Lorain Police had zeroed in on their longtime letter writer. But it had become clear they also had another target in mind.

Earlier that summer, Lorain Prosecutor Dennis Will opened an investigation into the anonymous letters on the grounds that they were “threatening” and “meant to cause Rivera emotional distress,” according to court documents. Officials suggested the material constituted aggravated menacing and menacing by stalking, two misdemeanors.

The same documents also reveal that the police were equally interested in locating the “internal informant.” The paper trail suggests the department knew it was bleeding internally and wanted to stanch the flow. FBI documents obtained by Scene quote an unidentified lieutenant stating that the brass knew someone on the inside was spilling information because material linked to sensitive cases had been funneled to the newspapers. Rivera planned to have the U.S. Secret Service scan the department’s computers in order to spot the leak.

On the day Montelon’s home was raided, he says, the cops were less interested in the actual letters than in who was serving up the insider juice. Cuffed and seated at his kitchen table, Montelon fielded questions from an FBI special agent who produced a list of active Lorain cops. As the agent prodded for Montelon’s source, the former cop played dumb.

After the raid, questions arose regarding who was directing the action and why. For one, the two agencies that were apparently in charge — the Lorain Police and Prosecutor’s Office — had obvious conflicts of interest. Chief Rivera and Prosecutor Will had been tarred and feathered in the letters, supplying them plenty of reason to seek out the perpetrator themselves. (Neither Rivera nor Will returned calls seeking comment for this story.)

When news of the Montelon raid went public, the agencies involved got caught trying to pass off jurisdiction. Days after the incident, Rivera told The Chronicle-Telegram that the FBI ran point on the search and that Lorain Police had gone along only for assistance. A week later, FBI spokesman Scott Wilson told the same paper the Bureau was merely riding shotgun for Lorain’s investigation.

Today, Wilson maintains that the Bureau’s agent tagged along only at the request of Lorain Police. The FBI case that launched with the first anonymous letter was left open in order to investigate further claims of police misconduct in future letters, he says.

“The Bureau would only have jurisdiction in regards to corruption issues, because the letters were not threatening,” Wilson says. “We explained that to the LPD, that the only thing we could look at was any allegations of wrongdoing of the police department, the allegations contained in the letters.”

The FBI’s only interest in identifying the letter writer was “so we could interview them in regards to what allegations they were making,” Wilson says. The agent counters Montelon’s assertion that he was questioned by the FBI about his department source. “That is not what I have been told.”

Montelon says he was also questioned by Sheriff Captain Resendez, whose exact role in the raid has been similarly difficult to pinpoint. The incident report from Wickliffe Police lists the Lorain County Sheriff’s Office as one of the assisting agencies, and Resendez was in uniform at the scene. But in a letter sent to Montelon in 2010, Lorain Sheriff Phil Stammitti wrote that “to my knowledge no criminal investigation was conducted or ordered by me or anyone else from the Lorain County Sheriff’s Office.”

Resendez later told The Chronicle-Telegram he had been asked to go along with the raid as an “independent outsider.” (Stammitti and Resendez did return calls for comment.)

At the raid, Montelon made it known that he was interested in spilling to the Feds about misconduct in the LPD — a fact noted in the FBI file. But the Bureau never contacted him. Wilson says there was no follow-up because the FBI had already determined by the time of the raid that the accusations in the letters were insubstantial.

Had FBI agents been interested in Montelon’s accusations, they would only have had to look at what Lorain Police were carting off on the day of the raid. The Bureau didn’t take possession of any of the documents gathered because the search warrant had been taken out by Lorain Police. But those docs — thousands of pages Montelon and others hoped would convince the DOJ to investigate the department — went out the door with the Lorain Police.

One week after the raid, the Department of Justice announced it would investigate the allegations against Lorain Police stemming from the council members’ June request.

In March 2009, the FBI closed its investigation of Joe Montelon and the Lorain Police letters. As with any Bureau case, the material was reviewed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which ruled that no federal laws had been broken. In a conversation that month with the Bureau, Rivera said Montelon would be “charged in the near future with menacing by the county prosecutor.”

Those charges didn’t come. The closest Montelon got to a courtroom was in February 2010, when he was scheduled to appear before a Lorain grand jury. The appearance was canceled two hours before its start time and never rescheduled.

But the scrutiny of Montelon wasn’t over. In April 2010 — 20 months after the raid and two months after his grand jury non-appearance — Prosecutor Will requested a special prosecutor to address the anonymous letters. The request was granted by Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, and a seven-month probe ensued. Again, they came up empty. Yet Cordray’s office forwarded the case to the Lake County Prosecutor’s Office for possible criminal charges. It’s been gathering dust there since November. (Lake County prosecutors did not return calls for comment.)

In all, nine law enforcement agencies have brushed up against Montelon: two police departments, two prosecutor’s offices, one sheriff’s office, the Ohio Attorney General, the Secret Service, the FBI, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. It’s the type of attention and untold tax dollars usually reserved for mafia dons or cartel honchos, not computer techs from the suburbs.

The one courtroom Montelon is eager to see the inside of is the U.S. District Court: In August, 2010, he sued the LPD, Rivera, Resendez, and a Lorain cop on the grounds that the 2008 search was unconstitutional. Two months later, Rivera countersued Montelon, saying the letters were defamatory and an invasion of privacy. In the court filings, Rivera claims he had “suspicions” Montelon had written the letters, but did not “discover” the penman’s identity until August 2010, when Montelon “made certain statements to the local media” — two years after the raid. But to this day, Montelon has not revealed whether or not he’s the one responsible.

Joe Montelon is still jabbing his finger in the eye of the Lorain Police, and now it’s on the evening news. He’s plopped down on a couch in a nondescript room, Casper-white in the twitchy glow of the set lighting. The segment, which ran on 19 ActionNews in early February, shows Montelon forking over a disc to investigative reporter Paul Orlowski.

The spot focused on the controversial case of Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen. In the mid-’90s, the pair were tried and convicted for molesting students from the Lorain Head Start daycare. Many believe they were railroaded through a tag-team effort of Lorain Police and county prosecutors. After spending 14 years in prison, their convictions were thrown out in 2008. But in January, the state Supreme Court ordered Smith and Allen back to prison, igniting fresh interest in the case.

The disc Montelon provided contains evidence that calls the convictions into question. At best, the video of a police lineup shows the child victims were not precise in identifying their abusers; at worst, it suggests they were coached by parents and cops. The investigation was conducted by then-captain Cel Rivera.

Channel 19 ran the tape after identifying Montelon as the source. He got it from an officer inside the department and agreed to appear on camera in order to shoulder the blame.

The anonymous letters stopped after the raid on Montelon’s house. The subsequent two years haven’t been easy: Each new day his young family woke up wondering whether criminal charges would finally come; legal expenses have forced him to cash-in his pension early. And he’s not winning any popularity contests back home in Lorain, where some relatives have cut him off.

“My family is angry about what I did. They think I shouldn’t have gotten involved,” he admits. But he remains defiant — still hooked on his role as the Lorain Police’s public agitator.

“Do I regret it? No. I’m tired of being scared. You can’t just hide under a rock.”

With a criminal investigation still open in Lake County, Montelon’s suit is treading water. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice probe into the Lorain PD continues. When contacted by Scene, a DOJ spokesperson would confirm only that the investigation is ongoing. Sources close to the probe say that DOJ reps have been meeting with current and former Lorain cops.

And every time Joe Montelon steps outside his Wickliffe home, he gives the pin-drop quiet street a once-over, just to be sure.

This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2011.